Byers resignation: One timid act of courage amid a litany of failure

When Labour came to power the Big Transport Idea was to get people out of their cars and on to public transport.

Under Stephen Byers and his predecessor, John Prescott, the big idea has gradually mutated. The idea now is to keep motorists in their cars until public transport is capable of dealing with them. There could be a long wait.

When Mr Byers arrived at the Department of Transport, the rail industry was still attempting to recover from the Hatfield disaster of 2000 which caused the worst peace-time disruption to the network.

Railtrack was unable to get to grips with maintenance or with those who were responsible for it.

The Potters Bar crash on 10 May in which seven people were killed serves to remind us that little changed during his relatively short stewardship. Theories of sabotage notwithstanding, the industry is still hopelessly dysfunctional and in dire need of an efficient command structure.

The one act of courage – and possibly of vision – during Mr Byers' time at the department was his decision to take Railtrack into administration. More important, perhaps, was his decision to create a publicly-backed "not-for-profit" company that is seeking to pick up the pieces left by rail luminaries such as Gerald Corbett, who left the company in turmoil and with £1m in his wallet. It is a measure of Byers' weakness, however, that he attempted to be coy about the fact that the new organisation would be underwritten by the state. It is arguable that taxpayers now realise that either they will have to foot the bill for better rail services or they will continue to suffer.

But there is a malaise that no British government – and certainly not the lightweight Mr Byers – could hope to get to grips with.

Britain will continue to make do and mend as far as its rail services are concerned without massive public investment. France's Train a Grande Vitesse, which now links the north and south of the country, was not built on the financial conservatism that has afflicted successive chancellors in this country. Private finance alone is not the answer.

The erstwhile transport secretary – he was not keen to take the job in the first place – was handed something of a pig in a poke by Mr Prescott. The public-private partnership that is to take over London Underground is as unpopular as it is impenetrable. And the part-privatisation of National Air Traffic Services (Nats) – the only major sell-off attempted by New Labour – has hardly been a success.

Because of the 11 September attacks and their massive impact on air travel, Mr Byers has been forced to offer Nats a £30m emergency loan. He has also pledged that a £50m injection of equity by the private sector – probably from the airports operator BAA – will be matched by a subvention from the public purse.

The Labour-dominated transport committee delivered an epitaph on the Government's 10-year transport plan at the weekend declaring it was "incoherent" and "incomprehensible". Gwyneth Dunwoody, the committee's Labour chairwoman, put the prognosis succinctly. "The cost of motoring is going to go down and the cost of public transport is going to go up."